Paris – capital of Irish culture

France, Ireland and the Republic, 1798–1916

Pierre Joannon & Kevin Whelan, editors

This volume explores the influence of Paris and France on the evolution of Irish political and cultural thought from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, exploring how the convergence between the two countries fed into the reimagining of Ireland in a cultural and political sense. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris loomed large in the wider European imagination. Paris functioned as a political capital for Irish republicans, and a centre of attraction for Irish writers, artists and scholars. This Parisian political link stretched from the Jacobites, through the United Irishmen to the Young Irelanders and the Fenians. Paris exerted a powerful influence on Irish writers, ranging from Lady Morgan to Thomas Moore, George Moore, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Derek Mahon.